What’s that you’re doing, Mr. Ernst?

“I’m inspecting the work our repair robots have done. My team and I developed them in connection with the research project AutoRep. They repair things like hairline cracks inside an engine combustion chamber. The first one mills out the damaged section. A second robot then welds on a perfect patch. Our previous project, AutoInspect, makes this possible. As the name suggests, it’s an automatic inspection process for generating digital data about components and the damage they have suffered, which form the basis for automatic repair work. Find the damage, record it, repair it – done. Robots can take care of the entire process today, so that human specialists are only needed to repair damage that is very complex. The AutoRep project has now been concluded, and the next step is to incorporate the AutoRep process into regular repair operations – and also to develop them further, so that they can be applied to other components, as well.”